I'm really happy to see that staff used some user suggestions and mixed up Neugarten this year.

I'm very happy with Shanti's sustainables. I'm not zero-waste, but try to reduce my single use plastics. I love all the items and including them on the site will make people more aware of these options.

I like this Neugarten way better and I think that the one thing we can all agree on is that the food industry itself is the problem, not diets. Big 👍 for the sustainable & local approach to things!

I'm happy as well because I wasn't interested in any of last year's new items. I love the cordials because they are the kind of filters I've always wanted. The shopping bags are nice as well so I intend to buy them all.

I hope we get to hear how Gunther's brother became a zombie after the way he was murdered.

Yes :D, thank you for taking user feedback into account. The revamped event is so much friendlier.

Loving most of the items and especially the cordials. Really happy to see a drinking vessel and bags for the off hand.

I'm relieved Neugarten was revised to be more inclusive. I'm guessing the huge product flip to being exclusively vegan was because of Gunter having a meltdown over his guilty conscience. (Nothing wrong with being vegan, I'm just trying to think of it in reference to the plot.)

The bumbus wax candles is my favorite item line, crowns of multi-colored bumbii are adorable and so unexpected!

What do you mean by "after", or by "murder". We know how zombification happens, and you have to be alive to start with. Not-getting-eaten-by-zombies is self-defense.

From the Subetapedia article about Bubbles, the Lost Skeleton shopkeeper.

This post in another thread is what we learned last year.

PS: Gunter's letter to Anne can still be found by going to Quick Bites.

I was there and I haven't forgotten anything. You are presuming guilty until proven innocent.

Just because Gunter feels guilty of removing the threat to himself and the rest of his family of being-eaten-alive-by-his-turning-into-a-zombie brother, and they themselves being in turn turned into ravening cannibalistic carnivores, doesn't make it murder.

At the time of this unfortunate act of self-defense, there were no cures for zombiehood in Subeta at all. Dr. Lockheart is a quack. That's why it was called the Great Pandemic.

Furthermore, unless Gunnar of the VIP is massively lying, zombiehood is only caused by biting, or as Titania McGee has reported, aerial vectors. "Being killed" does not cause unlivingitivity. You are supposing and then inserting some entirely new cause of zombification, that is not supported by evidence..

Can you please just....shut up for a while? Every time I see you in the forums you're putting down someone else's ideas and just generally being an annoying jerk. For once can you maybe just let people have their ideas without coming in and slapping them down?

Aside from that, I agree it's nice the event was changed. I wasn't around for last year's but I heard about the big backlash and it's nice the staff took the suggestions for once and changed it. Because it's not nice when vegans try to push their diet on those who aren't, just as it isn't fair for non-vegans to be disrespectful of people who make that choice for whatever reason. The two can co-exist as long as options for both sides exist, so it's nice to see new vegan items along side new meats and such on top of the sustainability portion ^^

charging someone fictional with murder is fun, but defending someone fictional who is innocent is also fun. You (apparently?) think that doing this is objectionable, and then say you don't like what I have to say elsewhere without saying anything specific.

If anyone thinks I have violated Subeta's Be Nice rule, they should report it.

Subeta has a feature where you don't have to see posts from people you don't want to hear from. It's here. Now, you have no reason to trust that link if you dislike me so much. It's under Personal - Friends.

It is an interesting hypothesis that Gunther maybe did not directly murder his brother (but possibly indirectly caused his zombieship). There would be a lot of plot avenues to go for there.

But ultimately, the evidence doesn't support that. In the news on July 7, 2018, Gunther specifically says:

In his letter to Anne, he details:

Prior to that Gunther says that he kept forgetting to turn on some of the tuns and that his alcoholism had been leading to other forms of neglect in the brewery. I have no idea what tuns are, but it is possible that maybe the tun that Burkhart was thrown into had been infested with a zombie virus. Maybe?

Either way, it sounds like murder to me. And I'm not sure NPCs can be "cured" of zombie viruses the way users can. Is there any precedence for that?

Another possibility is that when the tun was finally open, Burkhart was mostly dead, and to preserve him, he was infected with the virus. He may not have completely died, but he now lives on in a state of "unlivingitivity" (nice word, Solsticesprite) because otherwise he would be dead. He most certainly is no longer the Burkhart he once was, nor does he appear to recall his former life.

(Although the fact that he wants to fight you if you come to his shop with some brew from his brother's shop on hand leads me to believe that maybe he remembers something.)

Wasn't Fantine a zombie for a while to be with Skitters, then she cured and went back to normal? I don't remember how far along she was in the process so I don't know if she even counts as being a zombie, and I don't remember if she got infected by a bite, or maybe she was dosing on something more experimental?

I am intrigued by 1) one of NPCs possibly being guilty of murder and we know so little and 2) how zombies on subeta work biologically (I've been the one nitpicking every post in other threads about the zombies, especially their diet) and honestly the rest of Neugarten is fine and the items are beautiful, but omg I wanna know more about those two other things. xD

It's OK - I'm not upset by Solsticesprite's reply to my post. Challenging what I said is keeping the discussion going.

Another bit of information about Bubbles from the Subetpedia entry.

From Gunter's letter -

Maybe Burkhard was already a zombie so Gunter didn't really kill him. Everyone at Veta would know what Bubbles looked like if he'd been working at the Brewery, though, so it's unlikely that word about him running the Lost Skeleton wouldn't have got round by now.

The Subeta Wiki has more details. The entry for Bubbles

Back to Gunther

Other than that, Inspector Thorpe from the Ziara City Police Department announced that he was going to launch an investigation and -

So, maybe it's all about trying to kill a zombie which is illegal or the confession is a cover for what was really going on. Could Gunter and Bubbles have been smuggling human body parts to Atebus to feed the zombies who settled there?

Yeah, Gunter CONFESSED to a murder, I'm not sure where the "let's act like he's innocent."

He killed his brother. We had two battle challengers concerning this last year.

Mind you, the plot does raise some interesting questions.

1. Aren't there any police forces on Subeta?

2. The Subeta Agency of Intelligence comes across as an organisation on the lines of the FBI or MI5 rather than an ordinary police force. Why would the SAI have had an eye on Gunter for some time?

Maybe Gunter was smuggling special sausages rather than body parts. :) :)

PS Back to the ordinary murder plot idea. Maybe there are two ways of becoming an Unliving. Through an infection or some corpses buried in Shadowglen are resurrected for some reason. From the Survival entry -

Atebus has a police force, so I suppose Subeta has an equivalent - we just never had a need to see a police officer aside from the ugly 2004 Kumos in charge of the PIN system

There's probably no significance to Inspector Thorpe and Jack Cardale turning up. It's likely it was just a way of bringing back a couple of characters instead of inventing some police officers in Veta.

I'm amused that everyone's trying to figure out how Bubbles became a zombie after being murdered and nobody mentioned the OGs of zombie-making: necromancers and mad scientists. :P Oh, and freak magical accidents.

Maybe the poor guy was the original zombie? He crawled out of his grave after being brought back to unlife by heavy latent magical energies that were still lingering in the Vetan graveyard after some illegal experiments involving Life and Death Mage Amulets, Tomes, and a live sheeta (don't ask about the sheeta). He was unfortunately revived during pollen season and he drowned to death to boot - cue zombie coughing, wheezing, retching and sneezing (before he figured out that he doesn't need to breathe any more). Surprise: some time later, everyone across Subeta's globe is getting infected with magical, rapidly mutating and often horrifying viruses that drastically alter both minds and bodies! And it keeps happening every year! Thank you for bringing the magic of Survival to us, Bubbles! We owe you so much. :D

I mean, it's either that, or Gunter traveled a very long distance to dump the body in a Shadowglen marsh, where Shadowglen's own chaotic magical energies did the rest of the work.

Great ideas. Maybe Gunter is a necromancer - he drowned his brother to see if he could turn him into a zombie. The SAI had their eye on him because the were looking for evidence. Once they found it they arrested him and took him to a high security detention facility in the Arctic Frost to ensure that he couldn't escape.

This is starting to sound a bit like the X-Files. Is there a trio of hackers in the lower levels of Ziara who sometimes help Jack Cardale out? :) :) :)

Gunter and Anne don't know that he's the zombie Bubbles now though, right? So Gunter confessing to the murder could be because, as far as he's aware, he thinks he killed his brother because he doesn't know what happened to him afterwards. And even though he's a zombie now and still technically alive kind of, Gunter still did a pretty terrible thing that he feels guilty about regardless of it should be called murder or not since Bubbles is still around in a different form. It could at least be considered attempted murder, since Gunter did confess that's pretty much what the intent was even if it wasn't 100% successful.

We don't have the exact details on what happened to Bubbles after and how he became a zombie, so until we get more information it's kind of hard to debate the technicalities. And we haven't heard anything about Bubbles's opinion on the matter or if he'll forgive his brother or anything like that, if he's able to get some of his memories back.

I hope we get a continuation soon. I was hoping for something this year, but maybe we'll have to wait longer. :c